by Radley Balko
The Clarion-Ledger followed up with a reported series called “A Skeletal System.” The problems outlined in the series had been articulated many times before, and the series quoted several experts and policymakers who advocated scrapping the coroner system for a medical examiner system, as other states had done. One article looked at why Mississippi lawmakers seemed so uninterested in going that route. Most said that funding a proper medical examiner system wasn’t a priority for them because the voters who elected them didn’t seem to care. One of the more notable opponents of moving to a medical examiner system: Steven Hayne, now in private practice. Hayne told the paper, “Anyone that can talk about building a complete statewide, totally funded system in the medical examiner’s office needs to have their brain checked.” Of course, a well-funded, statewide medical examiner system would also have scuttled Hayne’s burgeoning autopsy business.
By the end of the 1980s, Hayne had significantly increased his share of the state’s autopsy referrals. Most coroners embraced him, but he also quickly became the only game in town. Even the handful of officials who had reservations about him felt that their hands were tied. “I didn’t like it,” says one Mississippi coroner, explaining why he used Hayne for autopsies over the years. “That was the system. I had to use the system because there was no other game.” Douglas Posey, now a medical examiner in Houston, said in a 2007 interview that during the 1990s, he had offered to do some autopsies in Mississippi, but was rebuffed. “I remember the Washington County coroner told me that if I wanted to do autopsies in Mississippi, I had to get permission from Steven Hayne first,” Posey said. “I thought that was odd, since Hayne didn’t hold any office.”
Most Mississippi officials either actively encouraged all of this or ignored it. But even among the few who both knew there was a problem and had the authority to do something about it, there was a sense of powerlessness. The late Jim Ingram, a former FBI agent, was the state’s commissioner of public safety from 1992 to 2000. Ingram at first defended Hayne, whom he at times called a friend. But he began to worry after Hayne and West clashed with two successive state medical examiners. “We didn’t see eye to eye,” Ingram said of Hayne in a 2006 interview, “but most of the autopsies went to him. I can’t say why. It’s just what the coroners and prosecutors wanted.”
Over the years, Hayne has given conflicting explanations for his resignation as interim state medical examiner. His explanation at the time—that he resigned so the state could begin searching for a certified medical examiner—didn’t make much sense. Hayne had been offered and accepted the job despite lacking certification, so it’s unclear why he would suddenly be so concerned about that particular qualification. He had also told the Clarion-Ledger that he planned to take the certification exam the following spring. A new DPS commissioner, Louisa Dixon, expressed disappointment in Hayne’s resignation, as did many of the state’s coroners. Even if Hayne had only taken the job as a public service until a more qualified candidate could be found, it made little sense for him to resign before a successor had been identified.
In a 2001 deposition, Hayne offered an alternate explanation: he testified that he resigned because Dixon “wanted another individual,” and had selected someone, but that his own lack of certification “was never an issue.” In a 2012 deposition, Hayne would claim that he resigned because Dixon had barred him from lobbying the legislature for more money. That too didn’t make much sense. Dixon herself has advocated for more funding for the office for her entire career. In 2008 she wrote a long op-ed in the Clarion-Ledger in which she declared that having one doctor doing nearly all of the state’s autopsies “endangers public safety.”
There is one explanation for Hayne’s decision that makes a lot more sense: Hayne’s brief tenure may have helped him see a way to make a lot of money in the autopsy business. Prior to his appointment, most of Hayne’s forensic autopsy work had come from his association with Jimmy Roberts. From his perch in Jackson, Hayne got a view of the entire state. In 1987, coroners and other local officials had ordered autopsies for 836 of the 8,000 deaths in Mississippi. Hayne performed about 107 of those autopsies that year as state medical examiner. The other 729 were split up among other doctors, none of whom were forensic pathologists, and few of whom really wanted to be doing them. A doctor who could take on just half the number of autopsies the state contracted out in 1987 would gross 140 percent more than the $65,000 salary of the state medical examiner. And that wouldn’t include the money one might get for lab work and court testimony. Take on more than 400 state autopsies, add in some private autopsies and testimony for plaintiffs’ attorneys, and an energetic state medical examiner could easily gross five, six, or seven times his base salary.
But there was a hitch. Just a couple months prior to his resignation, the Department of Public Safety received a complaint that two employees of the crime lab had been moonlighting as autopsy assistants. Commissioner Dixon ruled that DPS employees weren’t permitted to moonlight in the same field as their employment with the state. While he was in office, Hayne had seen firsthand just how much money there was to be made from doing autopsies as a private physician instead of as a state employee. If he had any notion of trying to do both, the DPS prohibition on freelancing effectively eliminated that option. But if he resigned, he’d be free to do as many autopsies for county coroners and prosecutors as he pleased.
In an interview with the Clarion-Ledger, Thomas Bennett, who had apparently spoken to Hayne about his decision to resign, told the paper that Hayne “made it very clear that he was going to go with his private work, because that was his first love.” It was also far more lucrative.
This of course is speculation—it’s impossible to say if this is precisely how Hayne’s thinking evolved. But it certainly fits neatly with the chronology. Hayne accepted the acting position, where he would have seen just how many autopsies were being done statewide. Then Dixon issued her ban on moonlighting. And then Hayne resigned. Immediately after resigning, Hayne’s autopsy load began to increase—rather dramatically.
There’s a good reason why stories about Southern injustice, cronyism, and good-ol’-boy politics inevitably come back to racism. And in this story too, there’s no question that Hayne and West thrived in a system that was created and honed during Jim Crow, and that for decades was used to reinforce the segregated social order. There’s also no question that the system’s problems continue to disproportionately affect minority and poor populations across the state. But no one has described Hayne as a racist. He married a black detective in 2006, although the marriage itself was short. In the 1990s, his findings assisted state and federal prosecutors in reopening several cold civil rights murder cases from the 1960s.
Instead, Hayne could be described more as an opportunist. He was quick to accommodate, whether it was a backwater sheriff or prosecutor, or a media-savvy attorney general or US attorney trying to make a name for himself by prosecuting elderly Klansmen.
On the rare occasion when the Mississippi death investigation system would come under fire during Hayne’s reign, the major players would claim they were only doing the best they could with a bad situation. Prosecutors and coroners claimed that there were simply no other medical examiners available. Hayne, West, and Roberts claimed they were merely doing what was asked or required of them. But all of that glosses over the fact that the system Mississippi had was exactly the system that all the important players wanted. It’s the system they created, and the system they’ve fought like hell to preserve.
7
THE WEST PHENOMENON
All talents, all gifts that I possess are directed straightly from God. I feel that the Lord wants me to work in this arena. It is a good fight.
—Michael West
In 1982, thirty-year-old dentist Michael West attended a lecture by a Kansas forensic odontologist named Thomas Krauss. In the lecture, delivered to the annual convention of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, West heard Krauss explain some experiments h
e had been doing with bite marks and ultraviolet photography. The field of bite mark analysis had blossomed since attracting national attention during the trial of infamous serial-murderer Ted Bundy six years earlier, but practitioners had been limited by the fact that bite marks seemed to begin healing after just a few days. Krauss claimed that ultraviolet photography could detect marks that had been left months earlier.
West, a budding forensic odontologist himself, ran with the idea. When he returned home to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, West and another local dentist named Felder “Buddy” Wallace conducted an odd series of experiments. West shaved a patch of skin on his thigh, while Wallace sedated him with drugs normally used in tooth extraction. Once West was under, Wallace bit West on the thigh. He had to do so aggressively, to mimic what forensic odontology textbooks called a “combat bite”—a bite administered during an attack. Soon, West and Wallace were paying their assistants, and criminal justice students at the University of Southern Mississippi, to bite one another. Once the “bitee” was sedated, the biter would chomp down and then hold the bitee’s skin between his or her teeth for fifteen seconds—until West hollered, “Time!” From their tests, West and Wallace claimed to have replicated Krauss’s experiment, telling the local paper that they could recreate bite marks left three months earlier on men and six months earlier on women. (West claimed women have an extra layer of fat, which he said preserves the scarring for a longer period of time.) “We’ve taken a lot of good humor from lay individuals who don’t fully understand what we’re trying to do,” West said.
The following year, West would testify in the first-ever Mississippi criminal trial to include bite mark evidence. In March 1982, a black man broke into the home of a white, thirty-seven-year-old Hattiesburg woman, assaulted her, and raped her. The victim could only describe her assailant as tall, black, and soft-spoken. According to District Attorney Bud Holmes, the woman’s attacker had bitten her on the cheek. West noted an alleged bite mark, photographed it, performed his own analysis, and matched it to a suspect. Holmes then sent West’s photos of the mark and a dental mold of the suspect to two other bite mark specialists for confirmation. West had not yet been certified by the American Board of Forensic Odontology, so Holmes wanted confirmation from another bite mark analyst in case West wasn’t permitted to testify.
One of the bite mark specialists didn’t agree with West’s conclusion; the other did. The expert who agreed with West happened to be Richard Souviron—one of the forensic odontologists who had achieved some fame in the Ted Bundy trial. On February 17, 1983, Holmes charged twenty-four-year-old Don Horn for the rape. Horn, as it turns out, was a three-year starter and standout wide receiver for the University of Southern Mississippi football team. After the charge, the NFL prospect was suspended from the school.
Prosecutors began looking at Horn after the victim identified him as “one of four black men” she knew. She also shopped at a grocery store where Horn worked as a stock clerk, and Horn was a patient of the dentist where the victim worked as a hygienist. Prosecutors also later pointed out that stock clerks at the grocery store sometimes used box cutters to open shipments, and that the victim said her assailant wielded a box cutter.
Not only was Horn’s trial the first Mississippi case to include bite mark evidence, the bite mark evidence was the only real evidence against him. Despite Holmes’s assertions to the press, it would turn out to be the only physical evidence against Horn. Semen taken from the victim was inconclusive. The fingerprints found in the home didn’t match Horn. And lab analysts could only say that pubic hair found on the victim had come from a black man. Horn also had an alibi: on the night of the rape, he had slept at his girlfriend’s house after serving as an usher at her brother’s wedding.
Horn was tried the following December. It looked bleak for him before the first witness had even been called. The prosecutors had used their challenges to remove all the black candidates from the jury pool, leaving an all-white panel. Then Horn’s attorneys objected to letting West testify, pointing out that he had never given bite mark testimony and that he wasn’t certified as a forensic odontologist. The judge ruled against them.
When he took the stand, West testified that the mark on the victim was a “dead match” to Don Horn. He relied only on marks from the lower teeth for his conclusion, and in fact didn’t even bother bringing his photographs of the upper marks. Richard Souviron also testified that the marks were a match. Norman Sperber, the other expert to whom Holmes had originally sent West’s photos, testified for the defense. He told the jury the marks were inconsistent with Horn’s teeth. Despite allowing both West and Souviron to take the stand, the trial judge refused to allow a second defense expert to testify about the bite. Remarkably, in spite of all of that, Horn was acquitted.
Horn’s trial was both the first bite mark case in Mississippi history and the first in which Michael West testified as a bite mark expert. It resulted in an acquittal. And yet no one seemed chastened by that outcome. West had already been lecturing at state law enforcement conferences about bite mark evidence, and continued to do so. The following year, he and Wallace were slated to give their own presentation on ultraviolet photography at the annual American Academy of Forensic Sciences conference. District attorney Bud Holmes told the Hattiesburg American that though he lost, he was pleased to have participated in a case that would be remembered as a milestone in Mississippi criminal law. “It’s tantamount to the first time fingerprints or blood type was used,” he said, referring to the bite mark evidence. “As it becomes perfected, it will be very useful.”
Michael West was born on September 11, 1952, in New Orleans. He grew up in Picayune, a town of about ten thousand people in southwest Mississippi, wedged between the Louisiana border and the Gulf Coast. In 1971 he enrolled at Pearl River Community College and then transferred to the University of Southern Mississippi, where two years later he earned a bachelor of science degree. West earned his DDS from Louisiana State University in 1977 and served active duty in the Air Force dental corps from 1977 to 1981. By 1981, he had set up a dental practice in Hattiesburg, a college town of about forty-five thousand people, ninety miles southeast of Jackson.
A portly man with thick fingers and a drawl as thick as sausage gravy, West was brash, ambitious, and, at times, breathtakingly reckless. His rapid ascent in the world of forensics from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s is a striking example of just how deferential and unskeptical courts, police, journalists, and juries can be when it comes to expert testimony. Many of West’s claims about his forensic abilities should have been suspect to anyone willing to give them some serious thought. Yet prosecutors as well as police chiefs, sheriffs, and others in law enforcement rarely thought to double-check them with actual scientists before putting West in front of a jury.
West often portrayed himself as a sophisticated pioneer of forensics but also an everyman grounded in common sense and folksy humility. Juries ate it up. He once told lawyers at a deposition, unprompted, that he had been reading a book on the Gnostic Christians and another on quantum mechanics. But he also wasn’t too fancy for a workingman’s beer. “While I’m drinking [Miller] High Lifes, I’m working on my magnum opus on why Galileo was wrong,” he said. “I’ve just got to get the pope to read it.”
This ivory tower–blue collar dichotomy also appears in West’s contradictory descriptions of how he got started in forensic dentistry, which he traces back to his time in the Air Force. In a 2012 deposition, West said his interest in forensics began when an Air Force colonel needed a forensic specialist. So “the colonel came in and he looked around the room. I was the lowest-ranking man. He said I was forensic officer.” But later in the same deposition, West claimed he was given the job because he was, in his words, “a boy wonder.” “I was a quick study. Whenever a difficult case would come up, Colonel Callaway would assign it to me.”
In 1982, West, Buddy Wallace, and West’s former dental school classmate Robert Barsley received some local
notoriety for their work identifying the remains of some of the 152 passengers killed when Pan Am flight 759 crashed just after takeoff from a New Orleans airport.
It’s unclear why West and Wallace stopped working together, but West and Barsley would go on to cowrite numerous articles. In 1991, the two men received a grant from the National Institute for Justice for an experiment similar to the one West and Wallace had conducted nearly ten years earlier: they paid married couples to bite one another, and then examined the resulting wound patterns. According to West, they paid one spouse $100 to be sedated and bitten, and the other $50 to do the biting. The two dentists then used ultraviolet light to examine the marks and photograph the wounds over successive days. According to West, “We were getting better images of the pattern 19 days after it was inflicted than we could an hour after it was inflicted.” Though West often cited the NIJ grant as an important credential, the results of his experiments with both Wallace and Barsley have not been duplicated by other researchers.
In one article published in a law enforcement magazine in 1992, West and Barsley took the method to another level. They claimed they had used it to discern what had really happened during an altercation in which a man was killed with a police officer’s gun. The man’s family believed the officer unjustifiably shot the man; the officer claimed the man had wrested the officer’s service revolver away and mistakenly shot himself. West and Barsley claimed that by using ultraviolet light, they found indentations in the man’s skin that were invisible to the naked eye. Moreover, the two concluded that those indentations could only have come from gripping the officer’s gun. Even if they’d inspected the man’s hands immediately after the incident, it was a spurious claim. But they hadn’t. Their exam took place well after the shooting. This is the sort of claim West would make over and over again.